Biopolitics abstracts away the historical and material basis of oppression which makes challenging capitalism impossible --- starting with the class relation is key.

As class contradictions have sharpened with the intensification of the crisis of profitability in global capitalism, cultural theory in the North Atlantic retreats further and further into spiritual explanations and resolutions of material contradictions. Rather than confronting the relationship of the poverty of workers around the world, the concentration of wealth into fewer hands, increases in unemployment and economic insecurity, the commodification of all aspects of life subordinating them to production for profit, and the deepening alienation of workers to class relations founded on exploitation in production, contemporary cultural theory has abandoned examining the social, the historical, and the material basis of these questions in production relations. Instead, it is turning to immaterial, affective, and spiritual explanations and resolutions of material contradictions and ideologically translating capitalism and exploitation into ontological conditions of life as such.

The Biopolitical Turn, or, Disappearing Class from Life under Capitalism

It is in the aforementioned context that cultural theory in the global North has embraced what Christian Marazzi calls "the biopolitical turn of the economy" -an increasing turn to "biopolitics" as a means to explain and address the social and economic contradictions in capitalism now. 1 At the core of biopolitical theory is a substitution of "life" -particularly the spiritualist concept of a creative "life-force" or what Hemi Bergson calls elan vital-for the historical and material relations of the dialectical praxis of labor and class as explanations of the material basis of contradictions in capitalism now and their transformation. In other words, central to biopolitics is a cultural spiritualism which ideologically translates historical and material relations into a transhistorical and autonomous power of life- a mystical vitalism - and posits this spiritual vitalism as the basis of bringing about new social relations. This new "spiritualism" of life is offered in a variety of articulations in contemporary cultural theory, from writings that overtly address theories of biopower and biopolitics as in the writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Commonwealth), Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer), Maurizio Lazzarato, and Antonella Corsani, among others, to the transspecies posthumanist writings of Derrida (The Animal That Therefore I Am), Agamben (The Open), and Donna Haraway (When Species Meet). These biopolitical theories claim to address a range of material problems that are the effect of production for profit in capitalism: from the encroachment of commodity relations into all aspects of life, including the private ownership of strands of DNA and whole species of plants and animals; to the degradation of the environment in the interests of profit; to economic crisis; to the extension of the working day; to the subordination of love and sexuality to production for profit; to the estrangement of workers from social wealth ... Yet, at the same time, biopolitical theories abstract these problems from their origins in class relations and exploitation. In place of addressing the material conditions and relations that have given rise to these problems, biopolitical theories posit an "other-world" and an "other-worldly life" -a concept of spiritual life that is prior to, constitutive of, transcendent of and/or outside of the historical and social relations of capitalism - as the basis of a new "common" beyond the material contradictions of capitalism.

The spiritualization of life in biopolitical theories, to be clear, is represented as a new form of materialism. The substitution of "life" for "class" in biopolitical theories draws from Foucault's theory of "bio-power" in which he argues that "modem man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question." 2 "Bio-power," Foucault contends, is a regime of power that, rather than ruling by threat of death, produces life through the disciplining of bodies, the regulation of populations, and through the "technologies of the self" in which bodies come to bind themselves to identities produced through sovereign power. In fact, Foucault posits "bio-power" -the instrumental disciplining of bodies such that they come to experience their own subjection as the norm of life and source of pleasure-rather than the exploitation of labor, as the material basis of capitalism. Capitalism, Foucault contends, is not possible without "bio-power": "bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production." 3 According to Foucault, "There is no binary and all encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations." 4 In this view there is "no regulative mechanism" of power relations. Instead, in Foucault's cultural imaginary of power, "power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere." 5

In this narrative, an explanatory critique of power as the effect of class relations of capitalism - relations between exploiter and exploited -is regarded as part of a binary metaphysics of power which discursively imposes a regime of truth (power/knowledge) onto what is actually, so the story goes, an ineffably and mysteriously plural, diffuse, and amorphous multiplicity of forces. On the one hand, life is assumed to spontaneously produce a discursive proliferation of meanings (knowledges) that then discipline and contain it. On the other hand, life is regarded as an ineffable and plural opacity that resists all conceptual explanation. The subjection of bodies is reduced to a contingent, "spontaneous" and aleatory effect of "life" as such or the sheer fact of living. This makes it appear as if "power over life" comes not from structural relations of exploitation, but from a non-structural, amorphous, cultural plurality- a cultural democracy of power from below to which all have access by virtue of living that is "everywhere."

Foucault's theory of bio-power is not a form of materialism but a form of cultural spiritualism. When Foucault argues that "bio-politics" is at the root of capitalism, he dehistoricizes "the machinery of production" into which he claims bodies are "inserted." The existence of "the machinery of production" -or a "controlled insertion" of bodies-is itself the effect of the dialectical praxis of labor. This is because power is not an autonomous, trans-historical life force nor is it an ineffable diffuse plurality beyond historical and conceptual explanation, but an effect of definite historical and material conditions and relations. Power, in other words, rests upon material conditions of production. Whether or not the society has the power to end starvation or to condemn the majority of the laboring population to a lifetime of starvation, has to do with the level of development of its material conditions of production-its forces of production-and the social relations of production (the labor and property relations) that determine the social ends and interests toward which labor is put. This is another way of saying that power is the historical and material effect of labor in the form of property. In a society in which property is privately owned, power is the capacity of the ruling class to "command over the surplus-labor" of workers in production. 6 At the root of power relations is an antagonistic class relation: the antagonism between owners of the means of production and workers who only own their labor to sell in order to survive and are exploited. The binary of class is historical and material, not, at root, discursive: class binaries are not the effect of nature, God, nor are they the effect of "Western metaphysics," "discursive construction," "binary thinking," or conceptualization, but the effect of private ownership of the means of production.

Foucault's theory of power does the ideological work of capital by concealing and inverting the structural relations of class in capitalism. In place of the material transformation of structural relations of capitalism, Foucault advocates "resistance" within-a change in the discursive and cultural regimes and a re-valuing of "life" -as the basis of a "different economy of bodies and pleasures." 7 This amounts to the updating of the culture of capitalism as the limit of change while the needs of the masses for material abolition of exploitation is dismissed as a reactionary nostalgia for the impossible-what Foucault dismisses as "The 'right' to life ... beyond all the oppressions." 8 Changing the cultural values of life and regarding this as constituting material change-i.e., as an end in itself becomes a means to ideologically update power relations without fundamentally transforming them.